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images/news/linux.jpgAxion Racing tapped Linux and other open-source software to help navigate its driverless "Spirit" car in last week's DARPA Urban Challenge. Details of the team's novel approach, which involved running Linux on a Sony PlayStation 3, are revealed in an interesting article at LinuxInsider.
The LinuxInsider story details how Terra Soft Solutions integrated its Yellow Dog Linux distribution with the PS3 and its Cell Be processor, to manage Spirit's on-board, real-time image processing system. The goal: navigating simulated city traffic in the qualifying rounds of the DARPA Urban Challenge (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) autonomous vehicle test in Victorville, Calif. held during the last week of October.
As previously reported when it successfully climbed Pike's Peak, Axion's Spirit UAV (unmanned, autonomous vehicle) is built on a 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee. The UAV is stuffed with Dell servers, laser finders, stereo cameras, infrared cameras, and other equipment guided by twin Navcom Starfire GPS units.
To meet the greater challenge of an urban course, Axion decided to boost the PS3 application's skills with some embedded Linux. According to Terra Soft, they could not have met the tough, 10-day development deadline without an open source platform. For example, for a USB driver, they quickly rebuilt the UVC driver to support the PS3 kernel, and to import camera data, they borrowed frame-grabbing code from Fswebcam. To work with the image format converter, Netpbm came in handy.
Thanks Linux Devices
Read more @ LinuxInsider</div>
The LinuxInsider story details how Terra Soft Solutions integrated its Yellow Dog Linux distribution with the PS3 and its Cell Be processor, to manage Spirit's on-board, real-time image processing system. The goal: navigating simulated city traffic in the qualifying rounds of the DARPA Urban Challenge (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) autonomous vehicle test in Victorville, Calif. held during the last week of October.
As previously reported when it successfully climbed Pike's Peak, Axion's Spirit UAV (unmanned, autonomous vehicle) is built on a 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee. The UAV is stuffed with Dell servers, laser finders, stereo cameras, infrared cameras, and other equipment guided by twin Navcom Starfire GPS units.
To meet the greater challenge of an urban course, Axion decided to boost the PS3 application's skills with some embedded Linux. According to Terra Soft, they could not have met the tough, 10-day development deadline without an open source platform. For example, for a USB driver, they quickly rebuilt the UVC driver to support the PS3 kernel, and to import camera data, they borrowed frame-grabbing code from Fswebcam. To work with the image format converter, Netpbm came in handy.
Thanks Linux Devices
Read more @ LinuxInsider</div>
